Contents

Plot
summary

The majority of The Sorrows of Young Werther is
presented as a collection of letters written by Werther, a young
artist of highly sensitive and passionate temperament, and sent to
his friend Wilhelm.

In these letters, Werther gives a very intimate account of his
stay in the fictional village of Wahlheim (based on the town of
Garbenheim, near Wetzlar).
He is enchanted by the simple ways of the peasants there. He meets
and falls instantly in love with Lotte (Charlotte), a beautiful
young girl who is taking care of her siblings following the death
of their mother. Charlotte is, however, already engaged to a man
named Albert, who is in fact 11 years her senior.

Despite the pain this causes Werther, he spends the next few
months cultivating a close friendship with both of them. His pain
eventually becomes so great that he is forced to leave and go to
Weimar. While he is away, he makes the acquaintance of Fräulein von
B. He suffers a great embarrassment when he forgetfully visits a
friend on the day when the entire aristocratic set normally meets
there. He returns to Wahlheim after this, where he suffers more
than he did before, partially because Lotte and Albert are now
married. Every day serves as a torturous reminder that Lotte will
never be able to requite his love. Out of pity for her friend and
respect for her husband, Lotte comes to the decision that Werther
must not visit her so frequently. He visits her one final time, and
they are both overcome with emotion after Werther's recitation of a
portion of "Ossian".

Werther had realized even before this incident that one of them
— Lotte, Albert or Werther himself — had to die. Unable to hurt
anyone else or seriously consider committing murder, Werther sees
no other choice but to take his own life. After composing a
farewell letter (to be found after he commits suicide), he writes
to Albert asking for his two pistols, under a pretense that he is
going "on a journey". Lotte receives the request with great emotion
and sends the pistols. Werther then shoots himself in the head, but
doesn't expire until 12 hours after he has shot himself. He is
buried under a linden tree, a
tree he talks about frequently in his letters, and the funeral is
not attended by clergymen, Albert or his beloved Lotte.

Inspiration and
parallels

As Goethe mentioned in the first version of his Römische Elegien, his "youthful
sufferings" played a part in the creation of the novel. Having
concluded his law studies in the spring 1772, Goethe found himself
working for the Imperial Chamber
Court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar. He befriended the
secretary Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem and, on June 9, 1772, they
attended a ball where Goethe was introduced to the 19-year-old
Charlotte Buff and her older fiancé, Johann Christian Kestner.
Goethe is said to have instantly fallen in love with Charlotte.
Goethe pursued Charlotte and the relationship varied between
friendship and rejection. Charlotte was honest with Goethe and told
him there was no hope of an affair. (She later married Kestner and
had a son, August
Kestner.) On September 11, Goethe left without saying
goodbye.

The parallels between this incident and the novel are evident.
Charlotte Buff, like her counterpart in the novel, was the daughter
of a widowed official and had many siblings. Goethe, like Werther,
often found it difficult to complete work. Both Goethe and Werther
celebrated their birthdays on August 28. However, the novel also
depicts a number of events that have close parallels to the life of
Goethe's friend Jerusalem who, like Werther, committed suicide.
Goethe was told that the motive for the deed was unrequited love
for another man's wife. Jerusalem had also gone on long moonlight
walks that reflected his sad mood and had also borrowed pistols to
carry out his suicide. And, just like Werther, he left a copy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's
play Emilia
Galotti on his cupboard in the room where he died.

Effect on
Goethe

Goethe distanced himself from The Sorrows of Young
Werther in his later years. He regretted his fame and making
his youthful love of Charlotte Buff public knowledge. He wrote
Werther at the age of twenty-four and yet, most of his
visitors in his old age had read only this book of his and knew him
mainly only from this work, despite his many others. He even denounced the Romantic
movement which he is most associated with by calling it "everything
that is sick."[1]

Goethe described his distaste for the book, writing that even if
Werther had been a brother he had killed, he could not have been
more haunted by the vengeful ghost. Nevertheless, Goethe
acknowledged the great personal and emotional impact that The
Sorrows of Young Werther could exert on those forlorn young
lovers who discovered it. In 1821, he commented to his secretary,
"It must be bad, if not everybody was to have a time in his life,
when he felt as though Werther had been written
exclusively for him."

Cultural
impact

The Sorrows of Young Werther was Goethe's first major
success, turning him from an unknown into a celebrated author
practically overnight. Napoleon
Bonaparte considered it one of the great works of European
literature. He thought so highly of it that he wrote a soliloquy in
Goethe's style in his youth and carried Werther with him
on his campaigning to Egypt. It also started the phenomenon known
as the "Werther-Fieber" ("Werther Fever") which caused young men
throughout Europe to dress in
the clothing style described for Werther in the novel. It reputedly
also led to some of the first known examples of copycat
suicide.

The "Werther Fever" was watched with concern by the authorities
and fellow authors. One of the latter, Friedrich Nicolai, decided
to create a satiric—and happier—ending called Die Freuden des
jungen Werthers ("The Joys of Young Werther"), in
which Albert, having realized what Werther is up to, had loaded
chicken blood into the pistol, thereby foiling Werther's suicide,
and happily concedes Lotte to him. And after some initial
difficulties, Werther sheds his passionate youthful side and
reintegrates himself into society as a respectable citizen.

Goethe, however, was not pleased with this version and started a
literary war with Nicolai (which lasted all his life) by writing a
poem titled "Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe" in which Nicolai
defecates on Werther's grave,[2] thus
desecrating the memory of Werther from which Goethe had distanced
himself in the meantime (as he had from the Sturm und Drang). This
was continued in his collection of short and critical poems, the
Xenies, and his play Faust.

Trivia

A major scene in the novel prominently features Goethe's own
German translation of a portion of James Macpherson's Ossian cycle of poems, which
were originally presented as translations of ancient works, and
were later found to have been written by Macpherson.

The Hebrew translation יסורי ורתר הצעיר was
extremely popular among youths in the Zionist pioneer communities
in British Mandate of
Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s and was blamed for the suicide
of several young men who were considered to have emulated
Werther.

Translation: "No doubt you are right, my best of friends, there
would be far less suffering amongst mankind, if men -- and God
knows why they are so fashioned -- did not employ their
imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow,
instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity."

Translation: "And I have again observed, my dear friend, in
this trifling affair, that misunderstandings and neglect occasion
more mischief in the world than even malice and wickedness. At all
events, the two latter are of less frequent occurrence."

Translation: "I have been more than once intoxicated, my
passions have always bordered on extravagance: I am not ashamed to
confess it; for I have learned, by my own experience, that all
extraordinary men, who have accomplished great and astonishing
actions, have ever been decried by the world as drunken or
insane."

From Wikisource

The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die
Leiden des jungen Werther) is an epistolary and loosely
autobiographical novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, first
published in 1774. A major scene prominently features Goethe's own
German translation of a portion of James Macpherson's
Ossian cycle of poems, which were originally presented as
translations of ancient works, and were later found to have been
written by Macpherson.

Werther was an important novel of the Sturm und Drang
movement in German literature. It was one of Goethe's few works in
the movement before he, with Friedrich
von Schiller, began the Weimar Classicism movement. It also
influenced Romantic literature that followed. — Excerpted
fromThe Sorrows of
Young Wertheron Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia.

This version is translated by R. Dillon Boylan for Project
Gutenberg. It is released on February 1st, 2001 and is not
copyrighted in the United States.